After several successful demos, Blynd are ready to unleash their full length debut. Mixing modern metal, thrash, and hardcore, they develop quite a groove laden tracklist that ranges in tempo, lyrical quality, and even features a few surprises that just seem to come out of nowhere. Most of the album has a rough, chugging guitar focus that sounds like a mix of Mushroomhead and Dew Scented that is very groovy and often thrash oriented, but at the same time repetitive. The guitar tone is very fuzzy in the way Mushroomhead does their work, and combined with the growled or snarled vocals that take on a hardcore impression, Blynd may be considered wandering into nu-metal territory at times. As gritty as this music is, tracks like "(Rage) Mindgames" are very accessible and will fit to the liking of anyone's metal preferences. Other tracks like "Bloodline" are also good at their thrash origins, but on the downside the lyrics tend to repeat themselves over and over again which discredits the quality overall. "Circle Of Life" perhaps shows the best qualities of Blynd because they feature a good mix of thrash, modern metal riffs with the right amount of groove, vocals that switch between the roars and also some clean vocals as well, and some well paced drumming as well as technical bass work that, despite how it sounds like crackling static at times, adds a lot of innovation to the music.
"Human Touch" is perhaps the one track that will blow listeners out of the water. Instead of featuring a heavy, chugging anthem quality and going straight for the throat, it eases itself in with some music box quality sounds and also some bell chimes and synths in the background over some recorded singing before delving into the heavier stuff. And even the heavier guitars still sound pretty tame as they chug along with a bit more of a cleaner sound. Only the solos sound viscious. The vocals mix on half and half between the short, barking snarl but it also features some singing too, which again leans towards a Mushroomhead reference. As a whole, this track is a complete anomaly in the way that "The Bleeding" was for Five Finger Death Punch's debut, but hopefully fans will like it. "Take What Is Yours" provides the best solo- fast and hard- that gives thrash metal/ heavy metal its best effort to show Blynd's colors. And it succeeds pretty well. Overall, Blynd's debut sits well at being a groove metal piece. It doesn't really bring anything new to the genre, but as long as one doesn't hate a nu metal skeleton, the basis of the music should entertain metal fans of all sorts well enough.
